Has released new Community Forums.
You can read their announcement at their Blog.
It will Updates and Feedback sections, sections on getting started and questions and answers.
Always a good idea to have your own forums, especially with the depth of plug ins that Red Giant now owns. Very cool.
The Guardian UK has a great article on why killing Google Reader is like Killing the bees.
Basically RSS never caught on with the internet in general, and it isn’t an easy source of income, and google would of course rather have us use Google+, though it doesn’t work at all the same way.
The thing is the users of Google Reader are power users, and they still drive much more site traffic than Google+ does. And they are the journalists and power users and bloggers. And it is us that drives people to sites, and drives links on sites like Google+ and Facebook, so Google is effectively shooting themselves in the foot without any forward thinking.
I totally agree with the sentiment. It is the same kind of Hubris as Apple giving up on it’s power users without releasing a new MacPro in years! Power users may not themselves be a huge sales market, but they are in fact a huge driver of others users and the internet in general.
And to drive those users away from your services may not hurt in the short run, but it will hurt in the long run. Who of us will trust Google to keep it’s services around? Will Blogger be next? How about Gmail? Calendar? What service will Google drop next? And the more users that leave, the less money Google makes over advertising, and reading their data, and it will make them more irrelevant!
App Storm has an article on Google Reader going down and some alternatives that I have not heard anywhere else. A must read! I didn’t realize that Pinboard could import your starred pages from Google Reader! Very nice! And I have never even heard of the self hosted Fever! App Storm has an awesome review of it as well. Going to have to look into that!
So I am delivering a show that was cut in Final Cut Pro, that was cut in 23.976, but needs to be delivered at 29.97, so I was using Adobe Media Encoder to do the conversion, but found I could only do it if I want either a single stereo audio track or a single mono mix-down.
I don’t have the ability to compress a version with dual or more mono tracks (or a stereo and dual mono).
Often I have to deliver shows with a stereo mix, and dual monos one with dialogue, and the other with music and FX, but I can’t do that with Adobe Media Encoder, so I have had to go back to the super slow Apple Compressor to do my compressions.
Not only could Media Encoder us a pass through, so if you have a clip with 4 audio tracks uncompressed, then just re-write it in the new file exactly as it was, but it also needs to at least be able to separate dual mono tracks so you can at least do stems on the textless version.
The other is that Premiere Pro really needs to be able to paste individual attributes of a clip, just like Final Cut Pro 7. Just being able to paste all attributes is less than useless in most cases!
I just brought all of my reels into Premiere Pro from Final Cut Pro 7 because I wanted to use Adobe Encore to make a new DVD and somehow all my clips had there volume put to negative infinite, so I have had to individually raise the volume one each clip, which was an incredible pain.
And yes I have put in Feature requests at Adobe, but I have been putting in the individual attributes since CS 5.0, so I am not holding my breath.
So the Save Google Reader Petition at Change.org has reached 100,000 signatures! Lets see it make 150,000! And hope that Google is listening, though I doubt it!
So there are a bunch of alternatives to Google Reader out there, and I have been trying them out to see what I will transition to, when Google proves just how evil it is and shuts down Google Reader.
Personally I use reader in my Browser and the awesome REEDER on my iPhone and iPad. And he says REEDER won’t die with Google Reader.
Though I hope he announces what backend he will be supporting soon, as I don’t want to give up Reeder, and am still waiting for the REEDER 2 for iPad update (The REEDER update on iPhone is awesome, and the iPad app needs those features).
The first I have tried is Feedly, which is a browser extension and RSS reader which currently syncs with Google Reader, but they promise to move to their Normandy Back end as soon as Reader goes down.
Now Feedly is pretty, but more digital magazine than Google Reader like, which makes it not as efficient for me.
It does run well and look nice though.
Netvibes has a free and paid version. It can import you Google Reader feeds though. When you first look at your feeds it is in a strange widget view, but you can switch to a list view.
Widget View, which I don’t like.
List view is much more Google reader like, and you can also see more of the articles.
It is pretty nice and works OK on the iPad, but the buttons are small and you have to pull down menus to mark as read (I like the auto marking read as you scroll past in reader) and it feels a bit slow and just not as well laid out as reader. It does quickly let you see full pages and the like, but having to pull down drop down menus to tag to read for later or mark as read is just not very efficient.
Newsblur is a recent addition, and will import your reader rss feeds, though it has been really slow since the announcement of Google Readers demise. It has a free version with 60 feeds or is $12 a year for all your feeds to work.
It also has a free iPad app. So far I would say they are getting way too hammered, as the interface is so slow as to be unusable. I will keep trying, but hopefully their capacity will grow and they will start to function better.
The OldReader also has potential. They are based on an old version of Google Reader before they made so many changes, but currently the import functionality has been deprecated. I had to upload my old feeds (thankfully you can easily download yours from Google) and it said I am something like 6000 in line for them to be imported , so I don’t really have any feeds to play with.
It is similar to Reader and seems very fast so far (I only have 1 feed, which is theres though). They do promise a new API so apps can use them and will keep working to improve quickly.
I will keep trying, but so far no cloud solution is nearly as good as Reader. Maybe once servers get better things will improve, but right now I don’t see which direction I should move. Hmm. Will keep you updated.
Engadget is reporting that Digg has announced a Google Reader replacement, which they were already planning, but will include the Google Reader API so it will be compatible with any software that already works with reader, which is an awesome idea. They just need to work really quick!
“After Google’s announcement, we’re moving the project to the top of our priority list. We’re going to build a reader, starting today,” said McLaughlin.
But the idea isn’t to build a Google clone, Digg is aiming to revisit the social features Google stripped out of its Reader and rework them for a contemporary online ecosystem.
“We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting,” added McLaughlin.
You can sign up at Digg for more info when they have it, which is hopefully soon!
Well the petition at Change.org only needs 749 to go, not that I think Google will listen, but it would be great if they would release their source code so someone else could take over. Be easy enough to make an add supported and a pay version, though it would need speed to work as well certainly.
Renderosity has a great review of the NVIDIA QUADRO K5000 from a graphics perspective. The only thing I would like to see is something like a Geforce 670, 680 or 690 instead of a GTX 480 as the comparison to a standard card, as I would like to see it’s performance against another Kepler card, one for gaming and one for workstation graphics and see the difference there.
Arstechnica has the story, though I heard it from google themselves when I went to reader this morning, as I do every morning!
Here is google’s spring cleaning announcement (which also looks like they are getting rid of CalDAV, so looks like no more interface with iCal. Yipee, thanks Google and FU!).
Honestly while it took me a while to get to RSS, it is how I interact with the internet, not through crappy social sites like Facebook or especially Google +. It is what I do on my iPad (thanks to REEDER, which uses Google Reader as a back end) and on any computer I work at. I log into GMAIL and Google Reader.
Hell this makes me think I need to stop relying so heavily on GMAIL as Google will likely kill it one day with little notice. And how about Blogger? Will they be next? What else is google going to kill?
There is a petition on Change.org that already has over 40,000 signatures in 2 hours! So please sign it.
In the mean time I am trying out NewsBlur which costs $12 a year, but gets it feeds from your Google Reader feeds, so at least you have the same feeds set up. Still the interface is certainly not as easy or as quick as Reader. AAARRGHHHHH!!!!